Word: picasso
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...onlooker. It was painting's unconscious answer to the theory of relativity or to the principles of narrative that would emerge in Proust or Joyce. The supremacy of the fixed viewpoint, embodied for 500 years in Renaissance perspective, was challenged by the new mode of describing space that Picasso and Braque had developed in a supreme effort of teamwork...
...with painting, so with sculpture. Picasso's Guitar of 1912, an array of cut and folded metal sheets that opened to let space in, was the first constructed sculpture in the history of art. It abolished the solidity, the continuous surface that had been, until then, the essential narrative of sculpture. From that unpromising-looking piece of rusty tin, a 60-year tradition of open-form sculpture was born that spread from Russian constructivism to the work of Anthony Caro in England and David Smith...
...Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life. His instinct for the real world was so strong that he probably would have produced something woman-shaped every time he took brush in hand. Nevertheless, some of his cubist still lifes of 1911 run close to total abstraction, depending on such slender clues as a glass or a pipestem to pull them back to reality. As he moved forward, he found in collage a way of linking cubism back to the world. Collage, which simply means gluing, brought fragments of modern life?newspaper headlines, printed labels?directly into the painting...
...Cubism was the climax of an urban culture that had been assembling itself in Paris since the mid-19th century, a culture renewed by rapid transitions and shifting modes. It was art's first response to the torrent of signs unleashed by a new technology. Not for nothing did Picasso inscribe "Our future is in the air" on several of his cubist still lifes; tellingly, Picasso's nickname for Braque was "Wilbur," after Wilbur Wright. "The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ," remarked the French writer Charles Péguy in 1913, "than...
That sense of being "always at the frontiers" of history itself is volatile, and it began to evaporate from Picasso's work before the end of World War I. It left behind a residue, however: his virtuosity. Around 1918 he found his first public, a small enough group compared with the worldwide fame he would be juggling by 1939, but much larger and more influential than the poets and painters around the studios of the Bateau-Lavoir. It was a public of admiring consumers, the cultivated gratin of Europe, people who needed a modern Rubens. Moreover, there had been...